Ask every gamer on Earth how many of them have imagined the offspring ofTomba,Banjo, and a Fuzzy fromPaper Mariospecifically, and the answer will at least be the same number of developers at Zockrates Laboratories, creators ofRuffy and the Riverside.
Not only does Ruffy resemble some of these classic characters, but his game also seems to be influenced by them as well.This game is a 3D, puzzle-platforming, collect-a-thon smorgasbord that manages to bring some fresh and exciting new gameplay ideasto the party all while housed within a gorgeous, hand-drawn art style.
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Does it all come together in the end? Notquite. At least, not for me. Ruffy And The Riverside doesn’t seem likely to be the next breakout success from the indie platformer scene as it stands. It’s got a couple of issues that I think we need to address.
Still, this is a game I mostly had fun with as a long-time fan of titles from the Nintendo 64 and original PlayStation era. Ruffy would’ve felt right at home on those consoles, for better or for worse. Back in the late ’90s, I still would’ve eaten this game up. In 2025, it sadly feels a little dated already.
Handsomely Hand-Drawn
Ruffy And The Riverside’s most obvious strength at a glance is its gorgeous art style. One might think it’s just another Paper Mario clone in terms of visual design, but it’s really its own thing entirely.Everything looks like it’s drawn masterfully with strokes of a Crayola marker set, and it results in a truly beautiful presentation.
You get a really diverse and appealing spread of location eye-candy here.
Seeing all of this in such a vast, sometimes open-world-ish format is a sight to behold. It’s really impressive that all of this continually works in a fully 3D perspective as well. Yeah, everything is flat, butthe world looks like it’s alive, and I loved reaching each new area to see how the biomes and creatures would be switched up in this style.
You’ll traverse around sandy beaches, spooky graveyards, harsh deserts, sprawling farmland, Final Fantasy-esque cities, lush forests, and more. For a game that’s not super long in runtime, you get a really diverse and appealing spread of location eye-candy here.
There are, unfortunately, some performance issues here and there as you run around or traverse the world on top of your rolling hay bale. A lot of the areas are seamlessly connected, and I’d have some visual stuttering at times when it seemed like the game would have to load something on the fly.
The visual presentation is obviously amazing.
This wasn’t ever a dealbreaker, but it is noticeable on occasion. There are also a few awkward sentences, seemingly resulting from a couple of localization errors. Again, it’s nothing egregious, but I saw them nonetheless.
Aside from that, the visual presentation is obviously amazing, sound effects and character grunts are well-utilized (though Ruffy himself has a soundscape I grew a little tired of), and the music would feel at home in one of those non-Nintendo platformers from around the turn of the millennium.
Cute Characters, So-So Story
To be honest, Ruffy himself looks a little nightmarish to me personally, as do most of the other bears in the game. Still, every other character is pretty adorable and charming. Your Navi-meets-Kazooie partner in Pip the Bumblebee is great, as is Sir Eddler, the gem-obsessed mole who sets off the conflict Ruffy needs to handle throughout the game.
The story that’s here is passable, but it’s not something to necessarily write home about. Perhaps I’m being slightly too critical here, since few 3D platformers typically present a worthwhile narrative, but Ruffy seems to be trying for something a bit more.
After unearthing an ancient, Rubik’s-Cube-looking villain, Ruffy and Pip must find a way to take care of him before he permanently destroys the planet’s life core. The Big Baddie has destroyed Riverside’s Hollywood-style sign, which coincidentally is connected to the core and keeps it alive and well.
The solution is for Ruffy and crew to collect all the letters of Riverside, R, I, V, E, S, and D, to repair the sign before it’s too late. Naturally, having these six letters to collect means you have six sections of the game to navigate and complete, so the action follows the pattern from there.
The story loosely deals with Ruffy dealing with being labeled as “The Chosen One,” and has some themes of sacrifice, community, and determination. It never gets super deep, but I’d argue that it had the potential to, which makes the ultimate path of the narrativeslightlydisappointing.
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There’s even a pretty big “twist” at one point in the game that didn’t land for me at all, but at least the effort was there.
At the end of the day, however,the characters I interacted with were fun and endearing. There’s a butterfly-collecting fox, a school of fish that just want to party, a sacred woodland race of fuzzballs, crows that always have riddles for you, and one Adventure Time-looking human… for some reason.
A Swap-Till-You-Drop Collect-A-Thon
The main crux of the title is Ruffy’s Swap ability, which is a power he seems to be the only one in the world to possess. With the press of a button, Ruffy can copy the texture/property/color of an object in front of him, then paste it onto something else.
As a mechanic, the Swap idea works pretty remarkably well throughout the experience.
This is a very cool idea, and leads to a lot of different ways to solve puzzles and figure out how to make an impossible path suddenly traversable. Need to get up a waterfall? Paste a vine texture over it and climb up. Is a stone object too heavy to move? Paste a wood texture onto it to entirely change its weight and physics.
As a mechanic,the Swap idea works pretty remarkably well throughout the experience. You can’t Swapeverything, but you quickly learn the rules of what can and can’t be interacted with in this way. It feels pretty good to really get the idea down and Swap around everything you need on the fly.
Ruffy And The Riverside is definitely a collect-a-thon game as well, andthere’s plenty to keep you busy. You’ll help the aforementioned fox add to his butterfly collection, discover items that allow you to paint custom designs onto the textures of the world, unearth gems for Eddler the Mole, and more.
Finding things around the world to collect is satisfying, and many require solving some sort of environmental puzzle in order to collect, adding to the sense of achievement when you see another number go up in your collection menu.
This includes things like metal treasure chests lodged in rivers that you may’t access, until you realize you can swap a wood texture onto the chest to get it out of the water and see what’s inside. Sure, it’salwaysjust some additional coins to add to your wallet hiding inside these chests, but it feels like a cool idea every time, either way.
Semi-Open Regions With Semi-Engaging Puzzles
All of this is spread between a pretty large area of play that features many biomes. A few of these are pseudo-open worlds on a scale that we don’t typically see in manysimilar 3D platformer titles. On the other hand, there are several areas that feel extremely linear, which I wouldn’t typically mind if the juxtaposition wasn’t so starkly different from everything else.
What is cool about the world design is thatthere aremanypuzzles you can naturally sidetrack yourself with every step of the way. I don’t want to oversell this, but there are some Breath Of The Wild-isms present here as you’ll momentarily shirk off your main quest responsibilities for a while to find a glyph to input onto a shrine-looking device, or to help a random creature in danger that needs saving.
This all feels pretty cool in the open world, but the level of engagement once the game directs you into the more linear story-required areas start to suffer a little in comparison. All of the puzzles start out feeling new and exciting, but formulas are never switched up enough throughout the game to really stay truly engaging.
Remember when you learned to paste a vine texture onto a surface you needed to climb? You’re going to do that about two dozen more times. How about when you learned that you could swap a river’s water with lava, burning a wooden gate that blocked your path? Or change the weight of an object to solve a balancing puzzle?
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All the while, everything you need is typically located directly in your immediate area, so it becomes puzzle solving by repetition and convenience instead of by experimentation and actual thought.
It gets most disappointing towards the end of the game when you’re gated off by the same, now boring puzzles simply… because. For example, I was blocked by a locked doorway in an endgame area that had four different colors on it. Immediately behind me were four stones, each one a color that was present on the door. The solution was to simply copy and paste the colors from the stones onto the same-colored panels of the door. Cool.
This ends up being a bummer, becauseother occasional puzzles in Ruffy And The Riverside are really, really cool. The graveyard section of the game requires you to speak with eight ghosts, each decorating their grave for a Prettiest Grave Contest and gathering information from them about the combination of a lock that you need to open.
Ruffy And The Riverside can absolutely shine at times, but the consistency just isn’t quite there…
Another time, I navigated an Ocarina Of Time Lost Woods-style sequence with playing card symbol puzzles in each room to show me which path was the correct one to choose.Things like this are really cute and genuinely fun.
Sadly, these nice moments just start to become too few and far between in comparison to a lot of the other stuff that starts to feel just a little too generic and uninspired despite the initial coolness of a mechanic or idea. Ruffy And The Riverside can absolutely shine at times, but the consistency just isn’t quite there for me.
Wonderful Gameplay Iterations, But Iffy Execution Of The Basics
It’s a tough challenge to make a game that hearkens back to the N64 glory days while still having enough juice to feel fresh and exciting in the modern world. Look no further than games like Yooka-Laylee, A Hat In Time, and Super Lucky’s Tale to see that this specific brand of retro-feeling, collect-a-thon, Banjo-Kazooie-inspired platformer is tricky to get just right these days.
Ruffy does most things proficiently more often than not, but I need to get some more negatives out of the way. The enemy and boss designs here are very forgettable. In fact, in the 6 or so hours a playthrough takes, you’ll see three boss fights, and (I’m not kidding) fewer than five regular enemy types.
The grunt enemies are, frankly, borderline terrible. I mean, look at this thing in the picture above. What do I have to do to ensure I never see anything that looks like this ever again?
The bad news is that you’ll see this severed Rowdyruff Boy head inside half a kiwano fruit bouncing around level after level. The additional bad news is that his enemy placement is always boring and unthreatening, continually ending with you just tapping “attack” once and ridding his unholy existence from the world. The good news? Well, there’s still not much in this regard.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the regular enemy pool is this guy, a living pile of rocks, and a shark. What’s worse is that the game’s bosses aren’t much more inspired. There are three bosses in the game, which is not even close to enough. All of them involve dodging a few basic attacks for 10 seconds, thenpummelingtheir health bar all the way down to its next phase in one go.
It’s pretty mindless, basic, and bland stuff, made even worse by the fact that two of the three boss fights are with the same antagonist, albeit with a different second phase in its last encounter.
This really is a shame, becauseRuffy brings a ton of creativity to almost every other aspect of its action/platforming gameplay. There’s one chase sequence, a river rapids section, aTony Hawk-likeextreme sports competition, unique racing, an isometric stealth corridor, chalk-drawn 2D levels, and a Crash-Bandicoot side-scrolling gauntlet.
None of the above isamazing, but it’s all still nearly objectively cooland unique. I absolutelylovegames that aren’t afraid toswitch up genresand perspectives at the drop of a hat, and Ruffy had a lot of that for me. This all just makes it even more confusing that the enemies, bosses, and combat didn’t get the same type of love and attention when they’re ultimately more of a focal point.
Closing Comments:
Ruffy And The Riverside has a lot of cool and new ideas, but doesn’t always execute on the necessary basics. The hand-drawn levels and characters are awesome, the semi-open world is fun to traverse and works well as a collect-a-thon, and several gameplay switch-ups and surprises along the way feel refreshing. Unfortunately, the few bosses and enemies present here are quite bland, and though the environmental puzzle-solving is initially unique and rewarding, it eventually stalls out in creativity and challenge. Overall, Ruffy ends up feeling a bit inconsistent, but it’s still a cute, enjoyable indie that has me looking forward to future efforts from Zockrates Laboratories.
Ruffy and the Riverside
Reviewed On PS5
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